


help me turn a blind eye

by kermiethefrog



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Canon Major Character Death, M/M, Top!Sam, bottom!Dean
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-26 00:16:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14390103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kermiethefrog/pseuds/kermiethefrog
Summary: Set during S2x22/S3. Sam was alive, and life weighed in his chest like a burden — Dean was going to die in a year, and each day felt like a counting down to an inevitability he couldn’t face.





	help me turn a blind eye

**Author's Note:**

> written for the wincest writing challenge on tumblr.
> 
> april prompt: first anniversary

New life felt like dust and mildew in his aching chest. He filled out his lungs and it felt strained and unfamiliar, like his body had forgotten and was stumbling to remember. Sharp pain lit up along his spine, an electric-spun fever that left him dizzy. Sam breathed. Again. Again.

It didn’t feel right.

When he lifted his shirt, there was a scar where he was sure there was a knife buried just moments before. Sam wasn’t a stranger to deep wounds; he wasn’t a stranger to being injured and waking up bandaged and bruised, but —

His fingertips traced down his side, as far as he could reach before the pain shot through his back like static.

Wounds didn’t heal this quickly. Dead things didn’t wake up. Fear was a slow crawl through his ribcage and a tightening wind around his guts, and there was something unsettled in his soul that he couldn’t shake.

Sam wasn’t sure he was supposed to be awake, but —

Dean’s haunted and hollow expression was the first stone in his stomach, the first weight. Sam began to count them in the days that passed. The first rolling stone — first day of resurrection, inextricable from each other. Like Jesus of Nazareth.

He wondered if the burden didn’t feel the same.

\---

Tension was thick and sweltering wherever they went, an oppressive and smothering force that arrived with the heat. It lingered in the space between them, choking Sam in close-quartered motel rooms. The unspoken thing hovered like a monster, the darkest thing that Sam had ever tried to kill; not for the first time, Sam let himself wonder if Dean didn’t have something similar lurking in his heart.

Sam hadn’t wanted to unearth his feelings if he was just going to lose Dean in the end, but Dean was a dying man who didn’t want last rites — just the confirmation that the way he felt wasn’t unrequited.

How could Sam deny him that?

“Since when?” Dean asked into his mouth. The way his brother’s palms felt against Sam’s throat was killing him, a slow strangle from the inside out. Sam kissed back and cut off the bite of tears with the press of his tongue against Dean’s.

“I was fourteen,” Sam answered. Dean tugged off his shirt, and Sam pressed his lips to the hollow of Dean’s throat. “We were on a hunt with Dad in El Paso. A ghoul came at me, and you jumped in front to protect me. You got a bad gash across your shoulders, but all you said —”

“You’re okay, Sammy,” Dean finished, and Sam felt the hands close in tighter. He nodded. “I got you.”

“And I believed you.” Sam’s voice felt world-weary and weak, trembling in his mouth. He wanted Dean to swallow all of his fear, but the same-named fear kept that desire from tumbling out. Whether by choice or his unsteady legs, Sam sat on the edge of the bed, tugging Dean down with him.

Dean’s fingers found his hair at the same time that Sam’s mouth found the pulse point in his brother’s throat. “Fourth of July, 1996,” Dean offered, and Sam dug his canines into soft skin. “Oh, fuck — Sammy — fell in love when I saw the smile on your face during the fireworks.”

Sam couldn’t stop the tears then. He wrapped his arms around Dean’s waist and hitched out growing sobs into his brother’s chest. Dean’s hands felt soothing in his hair. Dean’s voice was soft where it shushed near his ear. A comfort he called his own his entire life, and Sam was losing him.

“We could have had so much time,” Sam whispered, broken hiccups and stuttered breaths. “We could have had our ten years.”

“I know,” Dean whispered back, and the quiet wail dragged out of Sam’s throat unbidden, “I’m sorry, Sammy. I’m so sorry.”

Sam didn’t want to be comforted like this. He wished he could have been held back then, when his body was still his own, when he still felt human in the marrow of his bones, no matter how dark his blood ran. Not a walking corpse, not a death knell for his brother’s soul; he wanted to be a flesh-and-bones boy without conditions.

For the first time, the things Sam would have given willingly and what Dean took without asking were misaligned. The choice sat sour deep in the pit of his stomach, and the bitterness he felt remained unsaid. Nearly a hundred days, and his chest never felt so heavy.

\---

“Let’s go on a trip,” Dean said out of the blue.

Sam was exhausted. Perpetually so — between the garden variety monster-of-the-week and the counting down days as hellhounds nipped at Dean’s heels, he hardly felt like he ever had the chance to breathe. His mind was just viscera and gore, a horror show of _what if_ s. All he ever did anymore was scramble, his time spent on a desperate, last-ditch effort.

He was exhausted. Dean tugged him into the Impala and chose a direction.

They went north. A few hours into the trip, they had to pull the car to the side of the road; their breaths came out white-mist warm, their cheeks chill-bitten red. It was quiet between them. Once the snow chains were on the tires, they set out again.

Sam fell asleep in one state and woke up in another — Dean was nursing another cup of coffee. They went north, through the night, into most of the next day. Sam offered to drive, but Dean was insistent and silent, brows and jaw equally tight in their resolution.

It was an old cabin. The walk up to it left a damp chill sweeping straight through the curve of his spine. He was worried Dean wouldn’t make it, swaying on his feet as he was, but the soak of melted snow through their boots kept his brother awake long enough for Sam to start a fire.

There were no words exchanged to get them to strip down in front of the potbelly stove, cushioned and encased by thick, heavy blankets. His chin rested against Dean’s shoulder, teeth gentle where he scraped against the sensitive skin of his brother’s throat. Sweat pooled in the dip of his clavicle, even as he mouthed at Dean’s snow-frozen freckled skin.

Dean’s back was curved into his chest. Sam could feel the rise and fall of it, the safe and sacred knowledge that Dean was still alive underneath his body. His palms were flat against the softness of his brother’s belly, and Dean’s fingers dug into the meat of his forearms.

Lifelines, Sam thought. A halfway point of two passing ships, sinking in different directions.

“I’m scared, Sammy,” Dean confessed, biggest-secret soft. He closed his eyes, and Sam watched the sweep of his lashes as he tilted his head. “I’m — shit. I don’t know what I’m fucking — nevermind, I just —”

Sam angled Dean’s chin towards him and kissed his brother. The noise Dean made sounded the same as when Sam smacked the starry-eyed gaze from his brother’s face until Dean was lovedrunk, empty-headed, and needy. It was the same noise Dean made when he was wounded. His dick thickened against the dip of his brother’s back, an instinctual heatflash of arousal whenever faced with the man his soul felt inextricable from.

“I love you,” Sam said. Dean made the noise again, and Sam buried his fingers into Dean’s inner thighs. “I love you, I promise, I’ll bring you back.”

“Don’t,” Dean responded. He rocked back, one hand gripping the nape of Sam’s neck, the other wrapped around a wrist. Feverish and freezing, as though his body didn’t know what it wanted. Sam chased the flush of pink down Dean’s throat with his tongue. “We can’t go down that road again — Sammy, stop being a fucking tease and _touch me_ —”

It wasn’t the road he’d chosen. Sam broke the skin of Dean’s shoulder with the hard press of his canines and lapped clean the copper-sweet blood that bubbled up and colored dusky peach freckles. Sam was supposed to be dead, and every single day alive again didn’t feel like it belonged to him.

There were one hundred and eighty-three things Sam wanted to say to Dean. Dark and cruel things that existed long before his knees hit the mud in Cold Oak; things that were demon blood bred and sitting dormant in his lungs. Dean’s fingers tugged his hair tight.

“Say please,” Sam said instead, licking into his brother’s mouth, and Dean’s _please_ was debased and dirty where it was moaned against his tongue.

\---

Three hundred and fourteen days, the same number of stones held by Dean’s hands and forced down his unwilling throat.

“Sam, I did this to save your life,” Dean argued, and Sam felt anger like a vice around his throat, a tight constriction that refused to let anything but spite bite past his teeth, “and I ain’t looking for your undying gratitude or anything, but would it really kill you to stop being a little bitch about it?”

“No, you did this for _you_ , Dean!” Sam punched back, violent and furious, volume flying away from his throat like it was something feral. He turned on his brother — like this, they felt like enemies. “You did this because you couldn’t fucking handle it!”

Dean trembled. A cowardly man bred them both, raised them from soot and smoke — Sam could see their father in Dean, now. A coward who had to learn how to play brave.

“And?” his brother pressed. As if that wasn’t enough. As if that didn’t mean everything. “So I did this for me, so what? I couldn’t let you die, Sammy, I couldn’t watch you — I couldn’t just stand by and watch you die and do nothing.”

“And, what, you think I can?”

Dean was selfish. Dean was a child molded from abandonment issues; Sam felt pity cutting through his anger, and he hated himself for it.

His brother’s presence felt like a heatwave across his chest when Dean took a step closer. Like he was trying to bridge the valley that existed between them, the barren and broken place they had skirted around in the days prior. “You’re stronger than me. You’ve always been stronger than me, Sammy —” Dean started. Sam’s voice felt tight in his throat.

“I’m not. I’m not —” Sam thought about holding Dean in his arms as he died a hundred different ways. He thought about the monster he became afterwards without his brother. Fingers curled around Dean’s shirt, and he shut his eyes tight; he couldn’t go through that again.

“You are,” Dean said. Begged. Prayed. Sam felt like crying, tears pressing like hellhounds scratching behind his eyelids. “You have to be, Sammy, please. For me.”

“What’s dead should stay dead,” Sam whispered. The day crossed over to the next with the midnight tick of his watch. Another stone.

“Then let me stay dead,” Dean whispered back, and his lips felt like damnation where they pressed against Sam’s smoke-and-ash mouth.

\---

One year.

There was no room left in Sam’s chest, just an aching fury so hot it carved out his insides until he was nothing but a mouthpiece for fear. It left him angry. It left him mean, words unnecessarily cruel and cutting where they slipped past his teeth — Dean was always a galewind force in response, quick-trigger defensive and heat-ripped raw.

Maybe fighting helped soothe where Dean stopped being able to. Sam was never sure. He never felt better, but it never made him feel worse; stagnant on still water with his albatross like a noose. The anger clawed up his throat again, flashing in always-narrowed eyes, and Dean’s face wasn’t the mirror that Sam wanted it to be.

Dean’s softness was a rarity, pretty and bittersweet in the sweep of his pink-flushed freckled cheeks and bitten lower lip. His perfect cupid’s bow of a brother; beautiful in a way that made Sam ache everywhere. He hated it, now, all that gentleness — he hated it and could not hate it at the same time, shattered-glass heart so used to loving that it didn’t know how to do anything else.

“Don’t fight, Sam, please,” Dean begged. Resignation never looked so ugly on his brother before. In the same breath, head turned slightly to the left, it had never made him want Dean more. “It’s my last night. I don’t wanna fight anymore, I just — can we just be happy? Or pretend to be? For one night?”

Sam swallowed Dean’s fear like another stone. He spread his hands over his brother’s body and crushed him under the weight of his ribcage, blood and bones straining to be anywhere but where he was; he held Dean tight, chest to chest, like he could give his life back if they were only close enough.

If he could — if he could, Sam would in a heartbeat, would bury himself in the dirt and leave Dean to count stones in his absence. It was a selfishness that flooded his lungs with guilt and shame — ( _right there, fuck, Sam — fuck, that’s so good, baby, keep fuckin’ me just like that, Sammy_ ) — but selfishness started it, stuttered his heart into motion and forced air into his lungs.

Things were cyclical with the Winchesters, Sam told himself. Dean came, near-tears and shaking, gasping in air like he was coming back to life; Sam clung to the thought and let it feed the seedling of grief already being nourished in his heart. He would bring Dean back to life in the same way, a life for a life.

“I love you, Sam,” Dean said into his mouth. Dean tasted like dust and mildew, like sacrificial blood, Christ-wine thick and saccharine. He tasted like the bile that was always in the back of Sam’s throat, an acrid and bitter anger. He tasted like nothing at all, as though he was already gone.

Sam felt the words cling to the inside of lungs. _I love you_ , as though he were paralyzed. He closed his eyes and felt the certainty of the phrase thrumming through him just the same. He loved Dean wholly. He loved Dean so much, he hated himself for not staying dead. He loved Dean so much, he hated what he was going to do once Dean was gone. He loved Dean so much, he knew the things he would do to bring him back would mar him in a way that unholy resurrection had not. It was a need greater than love, and Sam could feel it strangling him as if Dean was the one with his hands around Sam’s throat.

His brother died on the anniversary of the day he came back to life. Sam emptied out his rockfall chest and started anew.


End file.
